I was up against Garry Kasparov, for 15 years the world chess champion. I captured the pawn offered in his opening gambit. It was a trap. We were on television debating the great Florida fiasco, and he had layers of argument in his arsenal.

I pointed out to him that all America's institutions were working as they are supposed to work - more or less. Yes, there were 57 varieties of screw-ups leading to the great chad hunt. The combination of the "butterfly" ballot in Palm Beach county, which confused the choice between Gore and Buchanan, and the local Democratic party's inept instructions to black voters in Duval county, had probably cost Gore upwards of 50,000 votes. There is no glossing over this. It is a disaster in terms of helping the lesser man to win, in terms of the implication of racial discrimination, in terms of getting rather more than half of the nation's registered voters to turn up at the polls next time.

And, yes, Secretary of State Katherine Harris's hairstyle was as dated as her impersonation of Mayor William Hale Thompson shutting down the vote-counting in Al Capone's Chicago when things weren't going right. But she hadn't got away with it. The press had exposed her political connections and her rum record.

Kasparov advanced a knight to a troubling square. America, as the leader of the free world, had always been able to point to its own elections as a model other countries could follow. How could it do that in future when both parties had taken the nation into the fog of litigation, when they were calling each other thieves? He echoed James Baker, for Bush, that every passing day heightened the crisis.

I castled. There is no crisis. The people who have gone on the streets have been like choirboys on a church outing. President Clinton - whom so many now would like to stay on for a third term - is running the country well enough without a president-elect bothering him.

Kasparov had a bishop he brought into play in the form of Griffin Bell, a former judge of the US court of appeal and attorney general under President Carter. "The election of a president requires speed, finality and certainty," argues Bell. But isn't legitimacy a higher priority than speed? What's the rush? The country has had these hiccups before. In the famous 1960 election, the Republicans argued against John Kennedy's legitimacy right up to the moment the men and women from the states took off their overcoats at the doors of the electoral college in December.

The idea that litigation is ominous would carry more weight, I argued, if Gore, with a 200,000 lead in the popular vote, were in any way challenging the legitimacy of the electoral college, trying to change the rules midway in the game. But he isn't and he won't. He is just asking for a fair and accurate vote. That would be vexatious if the rivals were separated by thousands, but they are not. It comes down to a matter of hundreds or scores and a system that is no advertisement for American technology. Machine voting is admitted by the manufacturer to have a margin of error.

Safety-first hand counts are provided for in Florida election law, and have been used by both parties in other squeakers. And they are in the election rules signed into law by Governor Bush himself. Gore wants to win, but he is not being as cynical as his critics maintain when he says the argument is as much about democracy as winning. Both men have a duty to protect the integrity of the single ballot. The right of every citizen to vote and to have his or her vote counted was won by ordeal too recently in this country for disenfranchisement by any means to be regarded as a trivial matter.

But Kasparov produced a check. These bits and pieces of argument I had advanced might satisfy a sophisticated electorate in the great American democracy. The people were used to playing on both black and whites squares with certain rules. What I was failing to consider was how it all might appear in convalescent Russia, in Africa and Latin America, and how easy it would be for the enemies of democracy to exploit the Florida fiasco as typical of the corruptions of bourgeois freedoms. He has a point.

I expect to get out of check with the help of the Florida supreme court which begins its hearings today. I hope that in this endgame the judges will come to the rescue with a ringing declaration that the people's right to the vote is not to be denied by contrivances of speed and bureaucracy and ambition. In the witch-hunts of the cold war, in Watergate, and in the Vietnam war, the judiciary has well served the constitution and American democracy. I think it will do so again.